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| Checking out the new chicken house! |
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Spring is definitely here and just like the weather, things are starting to warm up here on the farm. Over the past couple weeks I have been working on building a movable chicken pen, but since I have been out of town most of the time I have not had much chance to work on it, until now. My chicken house was completed this morning, and after moving it into the field we made short work of luring the chickens in with some feed.
We managed to catch just about as many roosters as hens though, so we had to "fish" out the big guys to cage up elsewhere (whilst we make preparations for butchering day). I'll tell you what, some of those roosters have a lot of meat on them. They're a bit old, so the meat may be a little tough, but I think they'll make up for that in weight.
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| Outside view |
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| Whoa! It has hinges! |
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Unlike the picture shows, I do have hay in the nesting boxes now, and I can't wait to see how the chickens have taken to them in the morning! There are still a few things that need to be fixed though. The hanging water feeder has a terrible hole in the bottom, so for the moment I'm using an old fridge door drawer. It would work well, but chickens tend to do their business in the most aggravating places, their water dishes being one, and so I will be updating my watering system soon to save time on cleaning it out every day.
There is also a certain goat named Faith (who should have been named, "I want to be cooked for dinner") who decided to check out the new "mountain" and, as you can imagine, jumped on top of my beautiful brand new movable chicken house, causing the middle support board to snap in half. The white material is... well, I'm not sure, but it's some sort of heavy duty plastic strong enough to withstand the destructive barnyard animal's hoofs. So, I have a board to splice together, a goat to... well, let's not go there, but thankfully, no roofing to replace.
Moving on. I know we're getting a late start on a lot of our planting, but now is the prime time for putting most things in the ground. One problem. One of the bearings broke on our disk system for the tractor and there is only one place here (John Deere, of course) that has the replacement part, for nigh $100. The Solution? Why, find an unwanted disk system buried under the weeds in your friend's woods and get to work pulling it out!
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| Unburied now |
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We decided to separate it to make it easier to pull out of the woods and load onto the trailer.
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| Nut Buster! (Wrong bolts though, whoops) |
